Floyd Halleck Higgins was born on May 15, 1886, in Keokuk, Iowa. After graduating from Iowa State College in Ames, he moved to Chicago and western Canada to work in a variety of public relations positions including Director of Public Relations, National Association of Farm Equipment Manufacturers (1922-1926). Higgins moved to California in 1927 where he became the News Editor for Caterpillar Tractor Company. In 1933, when Caterpillar moved its corporate headquarters to Peoria, Illinois, Higgins chose to stay in California where he worked as a free-lance writer. His articles appeared in Pacific Rural Press, Farm Implement News, Diesel Progress, Rice Journal, and other agricultural journals. In 1942, Higgins took photographs of Mexican workers entering the United States "brought in for the [sugar] beet harvest" for California Fields Crops, Inc. and as Higgins explains in a letter that he tried "to catch a lot of the social side in pictures." The photographs were taken mainly in the agricultural areas of the California communities of Woodland, Pleasanton, Manteca, and Salinas.

Floyd Halleck Higgins was born on May 15, 1886, in Keokuk, Iowa. After graduating from Iowa State College in Ames, he moved to Chicago and western Canada to work in a variety of public relations positions including Director of Public Relations, National Association of Farm Equipment Manufacturers (1922-1926). Higgins moved to California in 1927 where he became the News Editor for Caterpillar Tractor Company. He immediately found that farm machinery history "was gathered by each company's ad men when they needed to get up something for a 'special number' of some publication in which its ads appeared." In self defense, Higgins began collecting materials relating to the origins of combines and tractors but his interests expanded to include all forms of farm mechanization.

0.8 linear feet; 196 prints and negatives 135 digital images

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